The IMF and World Bank: Partners In Backwardness

Michael Hudson discusses his seminal work of 1972, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, a critique of how the US exploits foreign economies through IMF and World bank debt; difference between the IMF and World Bank; World Bank dysfunctional from the outset; loans made in foreign currency only; policy to provide loans for countries to devote their land to export plantation crops; US food and monetary imperialism; U.S. agricultural protectionism built into the postwar global system; promotion of dependency on the US as food supplier; food blackmail; perpetration of world poverty preferred; no encouragement of land reform; privatization of the public domain; America aided, not foreign economies; exploitation of mineral deposits; bribery; foreign nations politically controlled at the top; veto power for US only.

I wonder how many of us have any awareness of this. I have been a follower of Michael Hudson for a few years now, but I had never gone back to read his earlier work. This interview was done June 19th, 2019, but it is about what he wrote in 1972. I had no idea of the depths of depravity that the USA and world finance had descended to. He also explains why our Latin American proxies in war targeted the Catholic Church. OMG!!!!

Even following MMT and Hudson, I had had not realized until just now what a sucker I had been in falling for the fiction I had been taught about “Free Trade”.

How do we expect the USA Government to prosecute the crooks on Wall Street when the USA government uses the same business model as the crooks on Wall Street? I vaguely knew most of what was in this interview, but the stark details are really shocking. All these years (since the early 1960s) I have been taken in by the academic scam of free trade. It never dawned on me how “free trade” could actually be used as a weapon.